In the zones
★ WATCH out! Astronauts could soon be setting their time pieces to a new setting.
The White House has told boffins to get to work on a new time zone for the moon as we revealed yesterday.
Thanks to the lack of gravity up there, Earth moves 58.7 microseconds faster every day if your boots are strutting on the moon.
★ Here, KIM CARR clocks up 10 fascinating facts about time zones…
1 Every time zone on the planet uses Greenwich Mean Time as a starting point, which is measured at the Royal Observatory in London. GMT ran from noon to noon the following day but in 1925 it was renamed UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) with a day running from midnight to midnight, based on atomic time and became the official world time on January 1, 1972, although most commonly it’s still referred to as GMT.
2
Time zones are figured out by looking at the vertical axis and longitude as Earth moves around the sun appearing east to west not north to south.
3
Long before boffins had worked out this method it was practice for looking into the sky or down on the ground to figure out time based on the sun and where shadows fell.
4
The sun is at its highest point at around noon around the world apart from China, which has one time zone across both the east and west borders. At 3pm in the far west the sun is highest and at 11am in the fast east. Before the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949 the country had five time zones from border to border.
5
Mad Vlad Putin, inset, abolished two of Russia’s 11 time zones in 2010 and has been tinkering around with more back and forth for years. Following his illegal war in Ukraine and annexing the regions of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia they switched officially to Moscow Time in April 2023.
6
Sweden and Finland each own half of the small island of Markets Fyr in the Baltic Sea, with one half on Swedish time and the other on Finnish.
7
Each time zone generally increases its clock by one hour from the time zone behind it, except for Japan, which is two hours behind Vladivostok to its west.
8
Only a few days ago we moved into Daylight Saving Time, moving our clocks forward an hour. In Australia they shifted by only 30 minutes.
9
Crossing time zones affects how much sunlight you get into your body which knocks our circadian (sleep) pattern, causing jetlag. Bond actress Naomie Harris swears by walking barefoot on local ground for 45 minutes after a journey to beat it.
10
Singer Taylor Swift’s private jet crossed nine time zones in order for her to get to Las Vegas on February 11 for the Super Bowl. It was worth interrupting her world tour and internal body clock when her boyfriend Travis Kelce’s Kansas City team won the biggest night in American football.